Currently in platens for ink jet printers, a foam pad is positioned below the ink jet head to allow the ink to flow down and through it. The ink then goes into a waste tank. The waste tank will have some sort of pad to absorb the ink that was placed in the tank. When the head of an ink jet printer is firing ink down on a media, ink can build up on the platen foam at the edges of the receiving media when making borderless prints. This build-up can get on the back side of the media. The problem of ink build-up is especially prevalent when pigment inks are used and even more severe during borderless printing.
Thus, there is a need to provide a platen assembly for ink jet printing that avoids the problem of ink build-up on a platen that occurs during borderless printing with pigmented inks.